With what seemed to me astonishing speed, the bridge spanning the Oxford to Bicester (and soon to Marylebone) railway line at First Turn, Wolvercote, was demolished in a little more than a day last week.

Passing on Tuesday, wheeling my bike across the temporary bridge put up parallel to the old one, I saw a pair of yellow excavators scraping at the road surface in the middle of the structure.

The next day all that stood beneath had gone, leaving a yawning gap. Dumper trucks were carrying away stone and earth northwards along a road of grey ballast at present without rails or sleepers.

How, I wondered, had the span been removed without the diggers falling into the void beneath? A chatty Scot who was, like me, taking pictures of the operation, was thinking the same thing.

Also present was a woman who lived in a nearby flat. She told me of the locals’ concerns about noise and vibration, not just from the construction work but when, from next year, trains will be speeding in both directions, under a new, higher bridge, on Chiltern Railways’ Oxford to London link.

Couldn’t they go a bit slower past the houses? I wondered. This had been urged, she told me, but rejected by Chiltern. “They weren’t prepared to have a few more seconds on the travel time.”

This struck a chord with me (and not on account of the vanity project that is HS2).

Earlier in the day, I had been dipping into a book called Buxton: A Pictorial History. Included in it were John Ruskin’s acid comments in the 1860s about the Midland Railway’s line to the town from Derby.

This passed through spectacular scenery, including Monsal Dale which was crossed on a long viaduct.

Ruskin wrote: “That valley, where you might expect to catch the sight of Pan, Apollo and the muses, is now desecrated in order that a Buxton fool may be able to find himself in Bakewell at the end of 12 minutes.” (Alas, no longer. The line closed in 1967.) Such a comment, and many others in the same vein, might incline one to the view that Ruskin was implacably opposed to railways and an enemy of progress.

In fact, this was not the case. In the second volume of his masterly biography, published in 2000, Tim Hilton wrote that Ruskin had adopted railways as something of a bête noire to enliven his journalism.

“Ruskin’s attacks on railways... are repeated, provocative and humorous.”

But, he added, “Ruskin, like everyone else of his generation, relished the minor adventure of an expedition by train. He accepted that the railway system would be a permanent part of modern life.”

Some lines proved more permanent than others. The section of track being used for the first stage of the new route to London was once part of the so-called Varsity Line, linking Oxford and Cambridge. Like the Midland route to Buxton, this ceased operation in 1967.

What a loss this was can be gauged from the fact that in the 1930s, when a three-car articulated diesel unit travelled the tracks, you could move between the university cities in significantly under two hours. Compare this with the near-four hours of today’s X5 buses.

I have before me the LMS timetable for 1938. A passenger leaving Cambridge at 4.15pm would be in Oxford two minutes after 6pm.

The book in which I found this schedule, Vic Mitchell and Keith Smith’s Oxford to Bletchley, also contains a fine picture of the Wolvercote railway bridge in the early years of the 20th century.

Heading towards it is a London and North Western Railway steam rail motor, an early form of railcar in which the steam engine was hidden from view in the carriage.

These were part of a service out of Oxford that made stops at specially constructed halts at Port Meadow, Wolvercote (close to the bridge, and just visible in the photo) and further north at Oxford Road.

The service ran between 1905 and 1917, and again from 1919, to 1926, although on the last five days there were no trains due to the general strike.